8/6 PBE Update: Mecha Aurelion Sol & Mafia Braum Splash Art

The PBE has been updated! As we continue the 8.16 PBE cycle, today's patch includes the splash art for Mecha Aurelion Sol and Mafia Braum, continued Nexus Blitz testing & more!

Continue reading for more information!

(Warning: PBE Content is tentative and subject to change - what you see below may not reflect what eventually gets pushed to live servers at the end of the cycle! Manage your expectations accordingly.)

Mecha Aurelion Sol

Mafia Braum

Continued Nexus Blitz Testing

We're doing a number of champion specific balance changes to bring up the weaker ends of the champ pool. Overall feeling is that single target DPS chars are pretty weak so we're buffing up a number of them.

Also seems like tanks are pretty strong, so nerfing down some of their late game health and resists. May need to take a stronger system wide approach in the future, but we'll see how things shakeout on live.

Figured it would be useful to start a series of posts that give greater context on the changes we make to Nexus Blitz as we get closer to the live Alpha. Today let's talk about champion balance

Champion Specific Balance

We hope that most champions are able to find a place in Nexus Blitz's pool of viable picks. We'd love it if you could pick whoever you want and not have to worry about your teammates feeling like they got "stuck with you." We won't be aggressively patching everyone to “perfect balance” but we will take a look at extreme balance outliers who feel overly weak or strong. To this end, we plan on making champion specific balance changes as the need arises. Currently we feel like a number of single target champs are a bit weak so Kalista, Ezreal, Lee Sin, Rek'Sai, Azir, and Cassiopeia will be the first set of champs with some NB-only buffs to their base stats.

This is something we've been hesitant to do in the past because we feel it is dangerous to make characters feel markedly different in separate game modes. We want the mechanical skills you master on Yasuo in Nexus Blitz to transfer when you decide to play him on SR or ARAM. As an extreme example, we could buff Udyr on this map by giving him a ranged basic attack, but that's a completely different character than the one on SR. Even small changes to things like spell damage or cooldowns can have MASSIVE feel impacts across game modes.

To avoid this, our balance strategy for individual champions will focus primarily on base stats. We've seen on SR that a small adjustment to AD or health can result in significant power changes while not drastically changing how a champion feels to play. We're hoping this could also be effective on NB. Asides from base stats, we’ll also be tweaking champions like Sion, Nasus, and Veigar who have time based farming mechanics that need to be adjusted due to the pace of the mode.

As a side note, saying "we'd like most champions to be viable" does not mean we expect every team comp to be viable. Picking the 5th marksman into a team that already has 4 and no magic damage is prolly going to be a bad time. We're okay with that. Better pray the first event is Snowball Fight.

Thank you all for the continued feedback. We're so excited to get this map out to you on live.

-August
-Nexus Blitz Team-

Ezreal

AD:: 60 + 2.5/lvl >>> 63 + 3/lvl

AS/lvl:: 1.5% >>> 2.5%

Base MP/5:: 8.1 >>> 12

Lee Sin

AD/lvl:: 3.2 >>> 4.5

HP/lvl:: 85 >>> 95

Azir

AS/lvl:: 1.5% >>> 3%

Base Mana:: 438 >>> 500

Rek'sai

AD/lvl:: 3.35 >>> 4.5

HP/lvl:: 85 >>> 100

Cassiopeia

Base HP:: 537 >>> 580

Base Mana:: 418 >>> 500

Base MP/5:: 8 >>> 11"

Miscellaneous

Mecha Aurelion Sol chroma spotlight:

Balance Changes

* NOTE*: The PBE is a testing grounds for new, tentative, & experimental changes. Be aware that what you see below may be relative to other changes earlier this cycle! These are not official notes.

Context & Notes

"I'm personally pretty confident that it's a buff, given that the w cd buff ends up being pretty meaty late game given that the resists linger for 3 seconds. That being said, we were talking about yesterday and agreed that it can definitely be read as a nerf (and it might be) so we figured we'd tease it out and get player feedback and iterate if need be. We have a few fallbacks we're already talking about

UPDATE: We're going to go with a much simpler CL of W cd scaling from 14>10 and reverting the rest of the changes."

Check out [THIS PAGE] for a comprehensive list of the new content & changes currently on the PBE as a part of this cycle or catch up with the individual update links below !